A jumper dress by Estefania Cortes Harker for the new capsule collection by Central Saint Martins MA students for Pringle

A jumper by Yeori Bae for the new capsule collection by Central Saint Martins MA students for Pringle

A jumper by Timur Kim for the new capsule collection by Central Saint Martins MA students for Pringle

A jumper by William Hendry for the new capsule collection by Central Saint Martins MA students for Pringle

A jumper by Viktor Smedinge for the new capsule collection by Central Saint Martins MA students for Pringle

There are not many luxury fashion brands that can lay claim to a brown Highways Agency road sign. But then few labels are as old as Pringle of Scotland or indeed its factory (to which the 'place of interest' sign refers). Built in 1815, the slate-roofed cluster of buildings nestles in a sleepy valley on the outskirts of Hawick, birthplace of the Scottish knitwear industry. It's all rolling hills, tinkling streams, scudding clouds - a snapshot of bucolic Scottish Borders life.

'The only thing that changes in Hawick is the traffic lights,' quips Bruce Lindsey, the droll minicab driver ferrying me to the factory he knows so well (he worked for Pringle for 38 years). Normally this would probably stand true. But today something is afoot.

A flock of people clutching lumpy bin liners and supermarket carrier-bags or trailing cashmere jumpers on hangers is filing into the yarn store at the back of the factory. They're here for Pringle's Day of Record: a local appeal for people to bring in knits, photographs, memorabilia and recollections connected with the brand's 196-year history.

Today is the first part of a project designed to flesh out Pringle's practically non-existent archive and create a collection off the back of its findings. 'When I first arrived at the company and visited the factory, I asked about the archive and people laughed,' explains Benoit Duverger, Pringle's managing director, who started at the company a year after the brand ceased manufacturing in Hawick in 2008. 'I was shown a room with a couple of boxes stuffed with jumpers. That was all that was left after a flood in 2005 swept everything away. Hopefully today will give us back what the flood took.'

At one end of the yarn store is a row of long tables where visitors are laying out their Pringle heirlooms to be photographed and archived. Some of the knits are still in their original packaging dating back to the 1950s. In another corner of the outhouse a gaggle of beige-clad ladies is poring over archive photographs. Every so often they spot something that forces them to collapse into raucous laughter. By the entrance there's a makeshift café of mismatched tables and chairs now creaking with several generations of former factory workers reminiscing over a cup of tea. It's like
Antiques Road
show meets a church-hall jumble sale.

Still, there's no denying that Duverger is taking this archive business very seriously. He's enlisted the help of academics and students from Central Saint Martins design college. They are going to process today's data with a view to bringing the archive up to a museum standard. Alistair O'Neill, the head of the college's curatorial degree course, and his BA students are cataloguing the donated vintage pieces and visual material and recording oral histories.

Stage two of the project is down to the college's MA fashion students. Under the watchful auspices of the course leader, Louise Wilson, they are going to reinterpret Pringle's history and rejuvenate the brand with a capsule collection of knits inspired by designs from this new archive. 'No other knitwear brand in the world has the same recognition and respect as Pringle,' Wilson says. 'This project is great because it's hands-on. It's not about wearing white gloves. The point is not "newness", but how the clothes are reinterpreted.'

Within three hours of Pringle throwing open its yarn-store doors 200 pieces have been handed in, including a pair of cashmere-knitted long johns made in 1912 and an intricately knitted ladies vest from 1920. Carol Douglas, a former Pringle employee in her early sixties, contributed several bin liners crammed with knits. Douglas started working as a house model in 1968. Each of her 122 pieces dates from that period. The spoils include a pink knitted catsuit with a zip-up front, a multicoloured paisley maxi-dress and countless cashmere jumpers in different colours. 'That's the wonderful thing about Scotland,' says Duverger, chuckling. 'There's a tradition of keeping things. And because it's not warm enough for moths, they're perfectly preserved!'

Founded nearly 200 years ago (more than 40 years before Burberry), Pringle of Scotland should be the grande dame of heritage brands. Having started out making woollen hosiery and underwear, it was the first to use cashmere for everyday garments. By the early 1900s it had introduced 'knitwear' to describe outer garments. In fact, Pringle is credited with inventing the word. Ditto the term 'twinset'. And yet, despite the fact that Pringle twinsets became an upper-crust wardrobe staple from the 1930s to the 1960s (worn by the likes of Grace Kelly and Margot Fonteyn), despite the fact that its signature argyle pattern, created in 1920, was favoured on the golf course by that snappiest of dressers, the Duke of Windsor, Pringle ended up losing the thread somewhere along the way.

By the end of the 20th century the company was best known for its pastel golf jumpers and dowdy knits. In fact, until fairly recently, Pringle struggled to find a firm footing in the fashion world, having been in turnaround mode for the past decade. Thanks to several attempts to shake off its fusty image, Pringle had simply lost its sense of identity (in the past decade it stopped producing the twinset it had invented, while Chanel continued to make millions of pounds from the concept).

'We nearly did get to a point where we forgot who we were, what we'd achieved and our innovations,' Duverger says. 'Rediscovering our archive will put us in touch with our history. It is fantastic meeting people who had first-hand working knowledge of designing or working in our factories. They're able to explain techniques we haven't used for decades so that we can bring them back.'

According to Duverger the company has spent the past few years focusing on its ready-to-wear collection, transforming the Scottish label into an international luxury fashion brand. Now, he says, it's time for Pringle to pin down its X-factor products: those items that sell year after year and provide the foundations for whatever sashays down the runway. 'The idea is that you should be able to rip the label out of our clothes and know it is Pringle. That's where we really need to be.' Since knitwear is the soul of the brand, rediscovering its classics and giving them the opportunity to shine once more seems a savvy move.

Fast-forward three months from the Day of Record and the 12-piece archive collection created by the MA students in conjunction with the specialised knitwear craftspeople in Hawick is nearly finished. 'I wanted to make a piece that would work casually as well as smartly,' says William Hendry, 24, of his graded stripe twinset inspired by an archive image of a twinset from the 1960s. 'My colours aren't necessarily the same hues as the original design - I made mine quite awkward, actually - but it has quite an op-art, Bridget Riley feel now I think.'

Another graphic crew-neck jumper designed by Viktor Smedinge pays homage to a domino-spot pullover from 1955. It features huge black intarsia dots on a cream background. These form a supersized argyle pattern overlaid with an inky graffiti squiggle. Another block-coloured twinset by Yeori Bae causes one to double-take. Inspired by a trompe l'œil twinset from the early 1970s, her peacock-hued version consists of a jumper that looks as though it has a cardigan over the top. Timur Kim's references a monochrome argyle twinset from the early 1960s. His deconstructed V-neck version consists of spliced together strips of contrasting red, white, black and grey Argyle checks and an uneven ribbed hem.

Each garment pays homage to a different decade, but all are startlingly modern. They've been chosen for international distribution and have even opened doors to stores that have never bought Pringle before (notably Fred Segal in Los Angeles and Saks Fifth Avenue in New York). Indeed, it seems Pringle's return to its Scottishness is what is helping the brand expand further afield. 'The biggest surprise was how little detail it took to modernise the pieces,' says Duverger, who is clearly chuffed with the results. 'You can imagine a young woman wearing one of these with her skinny jeans and Louboutins as much as you can a granny with her pleated skirt!' How natty. How very Pringle.